The stack size is definitely a bit of a shock, when you consider that everything else in the game stacks up to pretty high levels. It's not entirely a bad thing, as it forces you to use belts and bots to ferry around shells instead of the inevitable turret creep that will happen. But you can also carry 10 nukes in one slot so it definitely comes out of the blue and I dunno if the justification is more valid or annoying.

I do think the relative levels of ammo storage feel strange. A chest holds ~40, a train holds 40 and a gun holds 100? Setting up ammo logistics for trains is self defeating because the best way to move ammo right now is to simply bring more guns. I just played with 4 gun trains and they cleaned house without putting a dent in their ammo. By the time artillery research is done it's very trivial to plop down 5, 10, or even 20 guns and so I think they should be balanced more around that kind of scaling.

I wouldn't be surprised if the shell stack size went up to 5-10, while mobile gun storage goes down to 20-50. This would make cargo wagons effective for cargo (ayy lmao) while guns can still be guns.

For me that it does not look like WAI and considering how lately cannons were added to the game (2 weeks ago I think) it is just the work in progress. It also limits transport of shells to belts and bots or... artillery wagons.

Also cannons have infinite research for shooting speed which is something the devs argued against for any other weapon. So cannons seem to me like WIP.

Maybe should I have written : WACI (Works as currently intended). I'm sure the devs explicitely intended to have 1 ammo stack on release. But this can change if their mind change, and this topic is there for that : give the devs our feedback. Ultimately, they will decide what they think is best for vanilla ( and let the remaining to modding domain).

I'm ok with the stack size.
The only thing that bothers me is the large ammo inventory in the cannon itself.
It should be reduced to 10 or 20, especially for the artillery train.
It doesn't make sense that you can fit only 40 in an empty cargo wagon but 100 in a wagon with the mother of canons mounted.

Also cannons have infinite research for shooting speed which is something the devs argued against for any other weapon. So cannons seem to me like WIP.

IMO the default shooting speed is already crazy good and may need to be slower. A handful of cannons- even without upgrades -will fire faster than the player's manual targeting speed. Biter creep is measured in minutes so any level of fire rate research is pretty much pointless. If you need more gun, build more guns yo. A big line of cannons looks better than a single machine gun artillery.

Because of how the fog of war works, it looks like your ability to auto target nests will be limited by radar stations. So without radar to rescan a territory they can still creep back in.

i like that the stacksize is 1 so the shells feel like a massive cannon shell but i think the train attilerie is unbalanced so a regular wagon can carry 40 and the attilery 100 it needs to be balanced i think 20 is plenty

Because of how the fog of war works, it looks like your ability to auto target nests will be limited by radar stations. So without radar to rescan a territory they can still creep back in.

No, the artillery targets biter nests outside the radar scanned area.
They keep a good piece of area clear.

Yes, shooting speed is insane and only makes sense if you use artillery trains and you have a high biter spread rate.
But for the stationary ones shooting speed is fine.

I noticed it is quite a waste of resources to just drop a stationary tower and let it clear the area. It's far better to set it up and "handclear" the working range with nukes or your favorite method and provide the ammo when you are done clearing.

No, the artillery targets biter nests outside the radar scanned area.
They keep a good piece of area clear.

Yeah, I bit later I saw a dev post saying that artillery uses map hax so it doesn't care about fog of war. It's still a beta so we'll see which way the devs go.

I noticed it is quite a waste of resources to just drop a stationary tower and let it clear the area.

I found that auto targeting is less efficient than manual targeting. With manual aim you can slip shells between nests and score double or triple kills pretty easily. Auto targeting aims for the nest core so it won't hit other nests.

"A stationary tower" is definitely not in the spirit of Factorio and balancing shouldn't focus around that. By the time you finish the high tech research there is no difficulty in building 10 or 20 guns. When that many guns hit the field, firing speed research is completely pointless. There simply aren't enough nests to justify it.

Also cannons have infinite research for shooting speed which is something the devs argued against for any other weapon. So cannons seem to me like WIP.

IMO the default shooting speed is already crazy good and may need to be slower. A handful of cannons- even without upgrades -will fire faster than the player's manual targeting speed. Biter creep is measured in minutes so any level of fire rate research is pretty much pointless. If you need more gun, build more guns yo. A big line of cannons looks better than a single machine gun artillery.

Because of how the fog of war works, it looks like your ability to auto target nests will be limited by radar stations. So without radar to rescan a territory they can still creep back in.

Yea, I personally think it should be every 3600 ticks instead of 200 (1/minute), because its kinda too fast. 1 per 3 seconds is still pretty fast, and there is no real reason to upgrade speed.

Also (yes, yes, Necro me to hell): turret only holds 15(!) if you hand-load it. You (and that's something I'd like changed, but nobody listens to me anyway) cannot control how many items an inserter loads, so 5 it is, no more.

For a game all about the automation, these decisions don't just feel wrong, they are wrong.

Yes, why the *wagon* version (moving and all) has a *much* higher capacity than a stationary turret is another mystery.

If the inserter is loading from a chest (or a wagon) then once the gun starts firing, it will reload the gun after every shot, so the gun's inventory size doesn't really matter. (Also pretty much every assembler works the same way. Inserters will load them upto to a certain limit, but if you hand load them, you can normally add a lot more ingredients).

As to the Artillery wagons having such a large ammo capacity, I think that is a balancing decision, so they don't need to head back to base to reload after just ten/twenty or forty shots.

I also found the stack size to be a bit of a shock. We can stack entire locomotives in inventory but not shells! I don't have a problem with this in terms of balance for weapons, but where it really gets annoying is when I need to reroute or put a section of my artillery belt underground. Boom, instant inventory overflow, shells all over the ground.

The real problem with a stack size of 1 while artillery wagons can hold 100 is, that it makes stationary artillery pointless. You would logically feed stationary artillery with the artillery wagon because it can hold the most shells. So if i have an artillery wagon visiting each wall - why would it not also do the shooting?

So as it is now, i do build the artillery turrets behind my walls. But i don't feed them. They just sit there and look really good (and boy, they are pretty).
I let the artillery wagon do the actual bombardment because it is more efficient to do it like that. It just gears up at the central military base and visits each wall corner in turn waiting a minute of inactivity at each station.

As has been already written: Atomic bombs stack to ten. That is a good stack size for powerfull things i think. It should be the stack size for shells in your inventory, in boxes, and in cargo wagons too. The artillery wagon and turret should have a stack size of 1 so you need to have at least a box next to your turret or a regular cargo wagon in your artillery train. Let the artillery wagon draw from the cargo wagons of the same train to not make it annoying to use.

P.S.:
The artillery wagon should have a lower range than the stationary turret. It does not have to be much. Just enough to give the turret enough advantage over the wagon to balance out the immobility.

Personally, in my mod, I plan to balance them against cannon shells, as my Tank MK2 and MK3 have an artillery cannon added back in 0.13 or 0.12, which by matter of pure coincidence has the same internal ammo category as the new artillery weapons.
My tank artillery weapon is basically just a slower version of the tank cannon, with longer range and dealing double damage, so it's broken being compatible as they are, I either need to balance them, or separate them. I'm choosing to balance them.

So my stack size would be 20, Which mean 800 in a cargo wagon.
This also gives them 20k damage per stack as each shell deals 1000 damage, same as 100 cannon shells which deal 200 damage each
The Artillery cannon though can only hold 15 shells, so I plan to change the amount that it can hold to 50.

Last edited by bobingabout on Fri Jan 19, 2018 9:52 am, edited 4 times in total.

I do find artillery wagon capacity being rediculous.
It is literally impossible to dismantle them without chestplosion. And you can't offload it to a single chest either.
In real life ammunition is transported by cargo wagons for a reason. Ammunition just can not be stored inside weapon platforms.
In the case of artillery train I would say 10 shells are enough to be stored inside the wagon. And obviously you can add cargo wagons to artillery trains for additional ammunition.
I see no problem in the requirement to manually transfer shells to cannons when you are driving such a train manually. And you can build resupply mechanism on dedicated artillery stops if you plan on doing it automatically.
Even if a wagon can hold only 10 shells it is already enough for automating biter clearing as it is. It is not like a train with 5 cannons comes and destroys 500 biter nests around which is pretty rediculous. Wars are won by clever supply systems and not by brute force.
However cargo wagon should hold significant amount of shells as obviously it is dedicated to transporting stuff. So a player who chooses to envolve cargo wagons should be rewarded. And it also makes much more sense in supplying stationary artillery.

So, make a blueprint of two assembling machines( and enough solar panels/batteries for it) touching cargo wagon and artillery wagon on both sides of the tracks and set them to produce artillery shells. Now you have artillery piece with whooping 300 shells available.
Or you can add 3 more artillery wagons. Their capacity totally should get nerfed.

Funner fact: Cargo wagons can hold materials for 1000 shells if you build over a coal patch. 20(x200) stacks of cannon shells, 20(x50) stacks of radars, and explosives are produced entirely out of oil. Burn the coal to produce energy, liquify the coal to get oil, crack it into petrol for sulfur, and sprinkle some coal on top for explosives.